On Tuesday, British lawmakers summoned several witnesses to Parliament to account for Boaty McBoatface—or, more accurately, the boat formerly known as such. Days earlier, Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council had announced that it would not be calling the government’s new polar research vessel “Boaty McBoatface,” the people’s overwhelming choice in an online naming contest organized by NERC that attracted global attention. Instead, the $300-million ship would be known as the RRS Sir David Attenborough, the fourth-place entry, named after the beloved British naturalist. It was an ingenious decision: The scientists saved face; the people did not riot. Crisis McCrisisface averted.

The “Name Our Ship” campaign proved an “incredible success,” Duncan Wingham, a climate scientist and NERC’s chief executive, boasted to the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee on Tuesday.

Wingham may be overstating his case. The parliamentary inquiry revealed one important way in which the campaign wasn’t a success: NERC and its partners in the British government don’t appear to have sufficiently planned for the day after launching the naming contest. They invited the public to engage with their project, but then didn’t clearly define what level of engagement they were ultimately seeking—and how to proceed if and when people actually engaged en masse. What’s the point of getting people involved if their involvement stops at voting in an online poll? It’s a bit like asking someone on a date without gaming out what you’ll do if you get a “yes.”

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And when you don’t think through these things, you end up sitting in a drab House of Commons conference room, offering hazy plans to quizzical lawmakers about how you’ll sustain public interest in your scientific research by broadcasting footage from a yellow submarine named Boaty.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. By many measures, of course, the Name Our Ship campaign was successful. The contest—boosted by the stellar submission of Boaty McBoatface’s creator, James Hand—raised widespread awareness of NERC and its vital work. David Attenborough is certainly a worthy namesake for the vessel. And Boaty McBoatface lives on. It lives on in the name of a yellow undersea vehicle that the Sir David Attenborough will dispatch to the deepest waters of the Arctic and Antarctic to assess the consequences of climate change. It lives on in its offspring around the world: Horsey McHorseface, Trainy McTrainface, Ice Ice Boaty. It lives on as a public-relations case study and a cautionary tale about the limits of democracy.

Yet Boaty, as an irreverent, inspirational idea, is a shadow of its former self. By the time it reached Parliament on Tuesday, it had been drained of nearly all the whimsy that captivated people around the world in the first place. Sure, those assembled delighted in seasoning the discussion with puns like “all hands on deck” and “walk the plank.” But at the start of the session, Nicola Blackwood, the committee chair, asked how NERC was planning to harness the intense interest in its competition—the hundreds of thousands of people who voted, and the millions more around the world who followed the Boaty McBoatface saga—to “do a better job about spreading excitement about science” among the public. And Blackwood didn’t receive very exciting answers.

When one lawmaker, Matt Warman, asked how NERC would capitalize in the long term on the formidable Boaty “brand,” Wingham, the NERC chief executive, vaguely suggested setting up a video stream to chronicle the submarine’s “many adventures” aboard the Sir David Attenborough.

“We’re just really starting to think seriously about what is the answer to your question,” Wingham admitted. (Granted, the ship won’t be operational until 2019 and the competition to name it closed only a month ago, but a month is an exceedingly long time in the world of viral PR campaigns.)

What’s the point of getting people involved if their involvement stops at voting in an online poll?

Another witness outlined the challenges in building on the Boaty phenomenon. “If you ask a fairly superficial, low-stakes question [like what to name a ship], you’ll get a different type of public engagement ... from the more serious, more substantive questions that the research council sometimes needs to engage the public in”—controversial questions like whether geoengineering is advisable to combat climate change, said James Wilsdon, a professor at the University of Sheffield. (The members of the committee burst into laughter when Wilsdon disclosed that he himself had voted for the name Boaty McBoatface.)

“So how do you make sure that you have a coherent system that first of all captures the interest and the imagination, as I think this competition has, but then retains that interest and makes sure that when the more difficult questions come along, you already have that captured audience?” Blackwood asked.

Wilsdon argued that thanks to social media, there is far more dialogue between the public and scientists on scientific issues than there was, say, 25 years ago. NERC’s Julia Maddock noted that more than half a million people had visited the naming-contest website, that the #BoatyMcBoatface hashtag had reached 214 million Twitter users, and that 60,000 people had viewed videos about the research vessel’s mission. “We’ve got evidence that they did get real science, not just fluff,” she said.

Then another lawmaker, Stella Creasy, addressed the holes in the testimony thus far. “I just want to tease out a bit more what plans you’ve got for using that interest that you’ve generated in the boat and NERC to actually get people into science and actually participating in scientific endeavor?” she said.

NERC is only now turning to these questions, Wingham repeated. Wilsdon proposed cultivating substantive public debate around Boaty by encouraging exploration of “the links between polar research, diplomatic agendas, and business agendas.”

“What you’re talking about … is essentially using this interest to start conversations with people about possibly contentious issues,” Creasy said. “The challenge [is that] in this instance ultimately the decision-making ability was taken away from the public” when NERC chose to name the ship something other than Boaty McBoatface. (To its credit, NERC informed participants in the fine print that the organization’s chief executive would have final say on the name of the ship.)

Creasy wondered whether that move would discourage people from engaging with the Sir David Attenborough’s scientific work: “The concern about getting people involved is them understanding what power they do have to influence what the boat does—from what it’s called, to where it goes, to what research it does, to how the research is used.” Even if their power in these matters is quite limited, those delegating the power should be upfront about that.

In unveiling NERC’s naming contest back in March, Science Minister Jo Johnson declared, “With the eyes of the world on this ship, this campaign will give everyone across the UK the opportunity to feel part of this exciting project and the untold discoveries it will unearth.” At the time, his words may have seemed overblown. And then, astonishingly, the eyes of the world did turn to the ship, and people across the U.K. did come to feel part of the project. That this happened is a tribute to NERC and the good people of the Internet. But it’s difficult to say that NERC’s response so far to that surge of interest amounts to an “incredible success.”

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.